Creative Criticism: Interview with Sophie Rabau

Sophie Rabau is an instructor and researcher at Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris 3). In her work, she endeavours to apply critical invention, or ‘creative criticism’.

To begin with, what is creative criticism?

It’s a term I use to designate a cluster of critical attitudes from different contexts. In France we also have the ‘theory of possible texts’ and ‘detective criticism’; the English-speaking world has invented the term ‘wreading’, a portmanteau of ‘writing’ and ‘reading’. Anna Gibbs proposes ‘fictocriticism’. Thus there are a number of ways of reading that I group under this term, but it’s that’s just my personal view. Occasionally I prefer to use a term such as ‘rhetorical culture’ or ‘theoretical invention’.

What all of these designations have in common is that the reader experiences a potential writing; the reader takes on a posture of writing. That does not mean the reader necessarily begins to write, but she reads by putting herself in the place of the author; that is, by being a potential writer herself as she reads. We might also say there is a kind of writing in which you don’t stop being a reader – I don’t, in any case, when I propose variations on a text.

Why creative criticism? Does it have a political or a militant aspect?

Not originally, no. On the contrary; I came to this point via the lectures of Michel Charles and his theory of possible texts. Charles himself was a follower of post-structuralism, of theorists and poeticists who took a rather non-engagé, textualist position – although Barthes had his periods of engagement. In any case, that position was not stated as something that could be political at all; it was more playful; ‘non-serious’ if you will. Nonetheless, that way of reading required that we adopt a critical position of rejecting authority: the authority of the text and of a reading to be validated by the context. As a result, we challenged the workings of the discipline, the institution and the hierarchy. Others, such as Anna Gibbs for example, take a militant, feminist position, saying, ‘I am going to intervene in the text as a feminist.’ For my part, I realized at a third stage that, yes, it was political, because it raised the issue of domination: the academic practice of reading, in commentary in particular, was always undertaken in the name of a globalizing reading of alleged majoritarian phenomena in the text. Commentaries of this type take no notice of a reader who might read the text from a minority or local pint of view. Furthermore, it goes without saying that there is a political gain to be made within the institution by questioning the possibility of ‘validating’ a reading, or the idea that there is a correct reading.

Does that mean reading can be a model of political action?

Yes, theoretically. That is one of the things I am thinking about: does this way of reading allow us to think of actions in which we would be more effective? This thinking takes place in a context in which, in France at least, those who disagree with the government’s policies often find themselves in a situation of powerlessness. To me, then, this experience of reading is really an experience of empowerment in which I take back the text to fight against authority, and especially against what they tell me is necessary and invariable. So to what extent can we transpose that to make a different model: that’s what I am thinking about at present. In any case, that’s where I feel there are battles I can fight.

On that point, could you mention a few creative reading experiments you have done?

A first example: in 2009, we went to give a public reading of ThePrincesse de Clèves in front of the Panthéon after Nicolas Sarkozy’s remarks [on the uselessness of studying The Princesse de Clèves – ed.]. Which didn’t help, I think, because we hadn’t questioned our mode of reading: we were only reproducing a submission; in a way, we were demonstrating our submission. And besides, it was completely ineffectual.

On the occasion of the demonstration against gay marriage, on the other hand, I wrote articles in which I took up some texts that are considered canonical among Catholics, particularly Catholic fundamentalists, and I postulated a homosexual reader of these texts. I pretended he was the one reading these texts. In this way I showed that the Catholics did not own these texts, and that they were powerless, because a gay person for example could read them differently. In other words, I dissolved their canon. I’ve done a bit of that with the Bible and the Quran, too ...[1]

More recently, I used theatrical means to show that there is never just one ending to a story. There are always several simultaneous possibilities: the spatial nature of theatre allows us to visualize that. The goal was to refute the argument of necessity, especially in politics, to refute statements of the kind ‘this is necessary; we cannot do otherwise’, which are problematic. My contribution was to say: ‘Let us learn to read differently; necessity is never more than an impression produced by a certain mode of reading, but there are others. And if we learn to read differently, we may reach a different conclusion.’

[1] ‘Verily, the Scriptures point the way to healthy, flourishing same-sex parenting, and the Gospel encourages the use of surrogate mothers’: see the articles in the ‘Sabotage littéraire’ series in the review Vacarme: http://www.vacarme.org/article2800.html.